Eclipse Con 2005: Tim O'Reilly Keynote

Tim's perception of technology patterns is truly remarkable.  Here's a distilled list of operational principles he offers for gaining competitive advantage:

• Embrace the value chain: Proprietary applications -> build on -> Commoditized technology -> build on -> Single-source suppliers.
• Design for Participation by architecting for easy incorporation into larger system.
• Design for Usability by releasing early and often, where users submit bugs and solution suggestions.
• If your business is being commoditized, focus on testing, assembly, and integration so user's can have the best of the market's commodities.
• Give users choices but not too many by offering products in proven configurations (standards).  As new configurations emerge support them.
• Since today's applications are internet based, treat them like services (not artifacts) and add features as a part of the normal user experience.  Tim calls this "The Perpetual Beta".
• Add value to your product by incorporating user-data.  Good example: amazon  Bad example: Barnes & Noble.
• Set aggressive defaults for aggregating and incorporating user data to improve the overall value of the application.  These can be unobtrusively configurable.
• Design applications for n-devices.  Today's software is above the level of a single device.
• Reduce complexity and barrier to entry for third party developers by explicity supporting emerging classes of applications (see PHP, Ruby on Rails).
• Be the single-source supplier for an essential subsystem of a bigger, open system.  Examples: Intel -> the CPU, Cisco -> Internet, Navteq -> Mapping
• If you can't own the data, own the registry.  Examples: Google -> Searching,

Tim started the presentation by quoting Jeff Hawkins, the author of On Intelligence saying "All the brain knows are patterns."  It's patterns like these here that will determine the very success or failure of today's technology companies.  If you can think of others or have comments, please add them here or ask Tim.